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It’s crazy. The Industrial Age replaces the horse and buggy with ever-faster cars and trucks. The system allows millions of drivers, each with a different level of education and skill, to go their own way on millions of miles of roads. It mostly works, though when it doesn’t, mistakes often are catastrophic.

For more than half the history of the automobile, engineers have been working on a solution by advancing the science of cars that drive themselves for you.

The time for autonomous car technology is now, says Jim Hall, principal of 2953 Analytics, and a frequent jurist on Motor Trend‘s Car of the Year panel. Autonomous cars will hit the streets before the decade is out, he adds.

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“The first autonomous cars will be taxicabs,” Hall explains. “Welcome to Johnny Cab.”

Imagine automated taxicabs whisking you around New York City or San Francisco. They’ll take the most efficient routes, and presumably won’t be programmed to take unnecessary detours and overcharge your credit card.

“The technology already is here,” Hall notes. Drivers’ parallel-parking acumen has been on the decline for years, and Ford and Toyota‘s self-parking systems threaten to make it a lost art. Mercedes vehicles steer themselves to keep you in your lane. Volvos hit the brakes for you. The latest night-vision technology uses heat sensors to detect other beings in your path.

Hall doesn’t like it one bit. “It’s a perfect example of technology progressing beyond the control of people who care about such stuff.”

The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, founded in 1958 to address the Soviet Sputnik challenge-it also takes credit for inventing the Internet-held autonomous car challenges from 2005 to 2008. Last year, Google began experimenting with autonomous Toyota Prii for its Google Maps.

We asked software engineer Sebastian Thrun, who led the Google autonomous Toyota Prius tests last year (see sidebar) to comment on when he thought the technology would hit the streets. Through his public relations department, he declined to comment, saying, “It’s just too hard to predict.”

So what if the technology is there? The question is, why? Isn’t this what high-speed trains and mass transit are for?

While the technology flies in the face of everything this magazine stands for, most car owners aren’t interested in driving, Hall continues.

With a majority of drivers finally using seatbelts, multi-airbag-equipped cars are safer than trains and buses. That’s provided cars and trucks can talk to each other. Such technology is feasible and increasingly practical. It’s just a question of time.

“About half of respondents [49 percent] said they’d be comfortable using a driverless car,” Accenture, the global management consulting, tech services, and outsourcing company, reports in a February 2011 survey titled “Consumers in the U.S. and U.K. Frustrated with Intelligent Devices that Frequently Crash or Freeze.”

Hall expects the change to begin with taxicabs. The savings of not hiring drivers can offset the cost of the technology, which promises to make cab rides safer and more efficient. He adds sports cars will be the last owner-operated cars remaining.

“Like horses,” he says. “Today, the only use for a horse is for sports.” It’s depressing, for sure, but if you’ve paid any attention to your fellow drivers, you know it’s a tough argument to counter.

Like flying cars, autonomous cars are long-promised

The notion of autonomous cars dates to the 1939 New York World’s Fair and General Motors’ original Motorama. Here’s what followed:

1950s: GM and RCA experiment with automated cars, using wire buried in pavement and magnetic pickup coils in cars. A 1958 Chevrolet Impala serves as a test car, and the technology is incorporated into two late ’50s concepts, the Firebird III and Cadillac Cyclone.

1958:Chrysler and Imperial are the first production cars to offer cruise control (called Auto-Pilot) as an option.

1977: Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering Laboratory tests a car that can follow roads for up to 50 meters (about 55 yards) at speeds up to 30 kp/h (about 18 mph).

1980s: Ernst Dickmanns and the University Bundeswehr Munich begin work on “robot cars,” and become involved in the $1 billion 1987-’95 pan-European Prometheus project.

1994: Robotic Mercedes-Benz 500 SELs drive themselves with humans in the passenger seats more than 620 miles on the Paris multilane at speeds up to 80 mph.

1995: Dickmanns campaigns a Mercedes S-Class roundtrip from Munich to Denmark, up to 98 miles at a time without driver intervention, at speeds as high as 112 mph.

2005: DARPA launches its Grand Challenge, in which sport/utilities and trucks, operated by GPS, drive on dirt roads with no traffic.

2006: The European Land Robot Trials begin.

November 2007: DARPA holds its ultimate autonomous car competition, the Urban Challenge, in which the teams build vehicles capable of driving themselves in “city traffic” (actually a closed course).

2010: Google tests autonomous Toyota Prii throughout California, using video cameras, radar sensors, a laser range finder to “see” other traffic and detailed Google maps. Software engineer Sebastian Thrun writes in his blog that the technology has the potential to cut the number of road fatalities in half, reduce oil consumption, and change the average 52-mile daily commute for the better. “Imagine being able to spend the time more productively,” he says. More time to spend Googling.

2010:Audi‘s autonomous TTS project car races up Pikes Peak in 27 minutes. The record for that course, held by driver Nobuhiro Tajima, in a racing Suzuki SX4, is 10 minutes, 15.368 seconds.